A look at the Microsoft Windows 10 Fall Creators Update

The Windows 10 Fall Creators Update has already been rolled out to customers worldwide with many new features and enhancements. The name might imply it’s aimed primarily at professional creatives, but there’s plenty in this update to interest the majority of Windows 10 users, including improvements to Photos, Mixed Reality and some new gaming features.

Here’s the pick of this major Windows 10 update:

A new Photos experience

The Photos app that ships free with Windows 10 has undergone what Microsoft is calling a “reimagining”. In essence, this is an expansion that allows you to add various elements to your photos and videos. These include filters, text, 3D effects and digital ink to enhance your visual storytelling.

Mixed Reality

Mixed Reality is Microsoft’s take on a combination of both augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Focusing on VR, this release supports a range of dedicated headsets that can be plugged into a compatible PC to run apps in a Mixed Reality VR environment. Microsoft promises you can travel “across time and space” without leaving your own home.

The Mixed Reality Viewer, meanwhile, will allow you to experience AR by bringing 3D objects (including those created in Paint 3D) into your real-world environment.

Microsoft Edge

Edge gets another makeover with tweaks including an overhaul of the Favourites system, allowing you to organise your bookmarks more easily. More impressive, however, is the new annotation system, allowing you to highlight in different colours, underline, copy and add your own comments. There’s a new virtual narrator system and you can ask Cortana for information on the content you are reading without having to leave the document.

Gaming features

For the avid gamers amongst you, there are a number of new features included in this update. Task Manager will now display information about your graphics hardware and system performance to make sure you meet a game’s requirements. There are new help options for Xbox networking, speeded up Mixer broadcasting and an easily toggled Game Mode can now be accessed directly from the Game bar.

My People

You can now pin your top contacts directly to the taskbar for quick one-click access through various communication apps. You can share with them by dragging a file to the contact in their taskbar and see animated emojis appear from the right from the taskbar, if that’s the sort of thing you like.

Other updates

There were also numerous one-off updates such as being able to ask Cortana to shut down, restart, or put your PC into sleep mode, as well as forwarding content from your iPhone or Android phone to PC and a handy currency converter built into the calculator. In security, Microsoft claims that Windows Defender Antivirus and the new Windows Defender Exploit Guard now offer better protection against ransomware, a malware type that’s been very much in the headlines of late.

There’s also a new Microsoft Tips app that can help guide you through Windows 10, including any updates we didn’t have room for from this Fall Creators Update!